Rumi's "Moses And The Shepherd" (Fragment And Commentary)
"...A sudden revelation
came then to Moses. God’s voice:
You have separated Me
from one of my own. Did you come as a prophet to unite,
or to sever?
I have given each being a separate and unique way
of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
What seems wrong to you is right for him.
What is poison to one is honey to someone else.
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
these mean nothing to Me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It’s all praise, and it’s all right.
It’s not Me that’s glorified in acts of worship.
It’s the worshippers! I don’t hear the words
They say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the Reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, burning.
Be friends
with your burning. Burn up your thinking
and your forms of expression!
Moses,
those who pay attention to ways of behaving
and speaking are one sort.
Lovers who burn are another.”
Don’t impose a property tax
on a burned out village. Don’t scold the Lover.
The “wrong” way he talks is better than a hundred
“right” ways of others.
Inside the Kaaba
it doesn’t matter which direction you point
your prayer rug!
The ocean diver doesn’t need snowshoes!
The Love-Religion has no code or doctrine.
Only God.
So the ruby has nothing engraved on it!
It doesn’t need markings.
God began speaking
deeper mysteries to Moses. Vision and words,
which cannot be recorded here, poured into
and through him. He left himself and came back.
He went to eternity and came back here.
Many times this happened.
It’s foolish of me
to try and say this. If I did say it,
it would uproot our human intelligences.
It would shatter all writing pens.
Moses ran after the shepherd..."
I stopped reading because reading "Moses and the Shepherd" was like reading the Parable of the Prodigal Son for the first time. Just as the "elder son" was offended by the "father'" treatment of the "prodigal, Moses was offended by Shepherd's treatment of Allah. I never learned whether the "elder son" ever got the message, but Moses sure got it in the fragment quoted here. Of course, neither story has a historical basis, they are parables. Moses and the Shepherd is a Turkish folk tale much older than Rumi, probably older than Islam.
I tagged this entry "non-duality' I always use this tag doubtfully because it points to a something or a nothing that i cannot comprehend. Moses is warned away from making judgments and distinctions; but what is "God" doing? (Judgment is mine sayeth your Lord).
The point is we do not, probably cannot, know what God is doing or not doing. Judging is possibly one of our cheapest and worst guesses. Yet the Bible is full of "God' judgments' and the Qoran even more so. Qoran is so much a book of separation and judgment that i consider it a miracle that something like Sufism came out of Islam, just as it is a miracle that the historical Jesus has somehow survived Christianity.
As this story begins, the separation appears to be between "high" and "low" religion, but Allah sees things differently. "Why did you turn away my servant?" Moses is asked; and he knows immediately that he has no satisfactory answer. If he is God's prophet, he was sent to unite, not divide. And he cannot unite by "sharing God's truth" with "non-believers" but only loving them as God does.
It seems to me that that Sufi's noted that all but one of the Suras begins with the words "In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful," and were able to ignore much of what followed.
The Divine is One, and in "It/not it" all are One. Separation is illusion. God asks Moses to look at Reality, though God knows he really cannot do this. I guess that is what faith and grace and the 8-fold path are about.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
came then to Moses. God’s voice:
You have separated Me
from one of my own. Did you come as a prophet to unite,
or to sever?
I have given each being a separate and unique way
of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
What seems wrong to you is right for him.
What is poison to one is honey to someone else.
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
these mean nothing to Me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It’s all praise, and it’s all right.
It’s not Me that’s glorified in acts of worship.
It’s the worshippers! I don’t hear the words
They say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the Reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, burning.
Be friends
with your burning. Burn up your thinking
and your forms of expression!
Moses,
those who pay attention to ways of behaving
and speaking are one sort.
Lovers who burn are another.”
Don’t impose a property tax
on a burned out village. Don’t scold the Lover.
The “wrong” way he talks is better than a hundred
“right” ways of others.
Inside the Kaaba
it doesn’t matter which direction you point
your prayer rug!
The ocean diver doesn’t need snowshoes!
The Love-Religion has no code or doctrine.
Only God.
So the ruby has nothing engraved on it!
It doesn’t need markings.
God began speaking
deeper mysteries to Moses. Vision and words,
which cannot be recorded here, poured into
and through him. He left himself and came back.
He went to eternity and came back here.
Many times this happened.
It’s foolish of me
to try and say this. If I did say it,
it would uproot our human intelligences.
It would shatter all writing pens.
Moses ran after the shepherd..."
I stopped reading because reading "Moses and the Shepherd" was like reading the Parable of the Prodigal Son for the first time. Just as the "elder son" was offended by the "father'" treatment of the "prodigal, Moses was offended by Shepherd's treatment of Allah. I never learned whether the "elder son" ever got the message, but Moses sure got it in the fragment quoted here. Of course, neither story has a historical basis, they are parables. Moses and the Shepherd is a Turkish folk tale much older than Rumi, probably older than Islam.
I tagged this entry "non-duality' I always use this tag doubtfully because it points to a something or a nothing that i cannot comprehend. Moses is warned away from making judgments and distinctions; but what is "God" doing? (Judgment is mine sayeth your Lord).
The point is we do not, probably cannot, know what God is doing or not doing. Judging is possibly one of our cheapest and worst guesses. Yet the Bible is full of "God' judgments' and the Qoran even more so. Qoran is so much a book of separation and judgment that i consider it a miracle that something like Sufism came out of Islam, just as it is a miracle that the historical Jesus has somehow survived Christianity.
As this story begins, the separation appears to be between "high" and "low" religion, but Allah sees things differently. "Why did you turn away my servant?" Moses is asked; and he knows immediately that he has no satisfactory answer. If he is God's prophet, he was sent to unite, not divide. And he cannot unite by "sharing God's truth" with "non-believers" but only loving them as God does.
It seems to me that that Sufi's noted that all but one of the Suras begins with the words "In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful," and were able to ignore much of what followed.
The Divine is One, and in "It/not it" all are One. Separation is illusion. God asks Moses to look at Reality, though God knows he really cannot do this. I guess that is what faith and grace and the 8-fold path are about.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------